If you know me offline, you know that I’ve been working with the Life Balance program from Llamagraphics for several years, both on the Palm and on the Mac (there is also a Windows version). After working with the Palm’s to-do list for a few months and syncing it with Microsoft Outlook, I noticed that this system didn’t really support me in my prioritization of the tasks I had to do. Life Balance has some functionalities that are superior to all other electronic organization systems I know.
It starts with defining main goals (also called life goals in the manual) in the outline window, which are then further broken down into projects, which in turn are broken down into sub-projects and finally activities that have to be completed on the way to the defined goal. Life Balance has four predefined main goals (work, home, family and self), which can of course be adapted and expanded. Different priorities can be assigned to the goals, which is done with a slider. Each activity indicates how important it is to the overarching goal. In addition, it can be specified where this activity will be completed, by when it must be completed or whether it is a recurring task, and how much effort it takes to complete this task.
The second window contains the actual task list. This is recalculated every time you select the window, because current information such as location, time of day and the day of the week are included (more on that later). Depending on how much Life Balance is intended to provide support in adhering to the weighting of the individual goals, the tasks appear according to this weighting, taking into account the location, the time of day and the defined completion dates.
In the third window, locations are defined. One place can be the city center, where the shops are only open at certain times. All of this can be entered, so Life Balance doesn’t show any activity to do in the city center if the shops aren’t open on a Sunday afternoon anyway. Places can also include other places, for example, it can be defined that the bank is in the city center, so that all information about the city center is inherited.
The fourth and final window is the icing on the cake: it uses two pie charts to show what the real weight between the main goals looks like next to the defined weight. Below you can see completed activities. The interesting thing here is that activities with a greater effort are taken into account more strongly in the analysis.
The challenge with this program, in addition to the necessary self-discipline, is the definition of an appropriate weighting of the different areas. If you take over the predefined areas and weight them equally, you will quickly notice that the area of work very quickly dominates all others, at least if you also enter your projects and tasks of work. Apart from that, the propagated life balance (I don’t mean the program) cannot be maintained in certain situations, be it because the project is about to be completed, be it because you have a job that cannot be done in 40 hours anyway; if one then realizes that the week has 168 hours, of which 56 are overslept, at least 50 are needed at work and for the way there and back, it becomes clear that the remaining 50 hours have to be divided between family, home and self – so an even division is hardly possible. In addition, different priorities are set depending on the phase of life and, as can be read in an interview with Reinhard K. Sprenger in the MLP magazine, this is also completely legitimate.
The manual on Life Balance is excellently written and contains not only pure operation but also tips on time management. A demo can be downloaded for free on the Llamagraphics homepage.